Help+Manual News

Posts Tagged Help & Manual

We are glad to announce the release of Help+Manual 6.4! This is a free maintenance update for all registered 6.xx users.

Besides several small changes and improvements, we have added the functionality to conditionally include/exclude entire table rows and columns. Help & Manual always had extensive support for conditional text on chapter, topic and text level. Excluding entire table rows or columns, however, was not possible and this has been changed:

The second new feature is about translation of images. Impict, the full featured image editor that comes bundled with Help & Manual, can batch process translated texts. To explain it simply, you save the text fields of Impict images to XML files, let them translate, then re-import the translation into the original image. Manually. If anything changes, the process needs to be repeated. With version 6.4 you can do the re-import and export to another image format in a batch process, folder by folder, not image by image.

Minor changes

Webhelp: sitemap url can contain user variables.

Webhelp: Default for FORCETOCSYNC setting in configuration changed to FALSE.

Webhelp: small bug fix, the file that contains HTML popup topics was not released after Webhelp export, effectively locking it until H&M was closed.

Webhelp main skin changed, so that TOC is no longer automatically synchronized. TOC link implemented in header with rel=”nofollow” attribute.

PDF/Print: wrong page break calculation caused floating images on the first line of a topic to hang off the bottom of the page.

Toggles (dropdown texts) in PDF: when “no icon” is specified, H&M removes the indentation before the text heading, toggle images with caption were exported as left aligned.

Toggle images: when using the variable <%HMFIGURECOUNTER%> in the title or caption of a toggle image (and using the same settings for expanded/collapsed), the counter was incremented twice.

Toggle images: using a percent “%” character in the title or caption of a toggle caused a runtime Javascript error (the script in helpman_topicinit.js did a decodeURI for every attribute, not just for the hm.srcX attributes.

Multiple ampersands in text caused Russian text to be not converted in CHMs on a Russian windows system.

Bugfixes topic editor: when inserting rows or columns in a table and the context menu was called by pressing the Windows menu button, H&M created an AV (in Richview, actually). Word-break before parantheses was possible such as in function();. Bullets problem on Polish Windows 7 fixed (Wingdings #216 and #217 were not displayed correctly). Inserting new videos: the text style “Image Caption” is now applied by default.

When creating a link with drag & drop from the TOC into a topic and the source project was not identical with the target project, the project reference was not assigned.

RTF export: small bug fixed, when duplicate chapter headings (non-topics) were not repeated

Invalid PNG images could crash H&M

CHM import: when a CHM contained ambigious image names (duplicate images in different internal folders), the image names were not correctly resolved in some cases (e.g. with “..\myfolder\image.jpg”)

Positioning of dialog windows on secondary monitors improved, positioning of the image padding popup window on secondary monitors was wrong.

Full project report: videos and video preview images are reported. Furthermore, when toggle image used a different picture for collapsed view, this picture was missing in the project report.

We are glad to announce the release of Help+Manual 6.3! This is a free update for all registered 6.xx users.

The focus for this update was on the import functions – Winhelp, Robohelp, HTML and Word/RTF import have been revised or completely reimplemented. The Winhelp (.hlp) import in particular has become significantly faster, Robohelp import reads more project details (e.g. conditional text), Word/RTF import now fully resolves in-document links and the generic HTML import has got extended import options.

The second most important new feature is about Webhelp: Help & Manual’s Webhelp has always been context-sensitive and you could display a particular topic by referencing the topic ID after the question mark in the url. Now, we added context numbers as well! Help & Manual 6.3 exports Webhelp with context numbers that can be called alternatively, similar to the context-sensitive help calls in HTML Help.

Furthermore, we have added new features to the UI to improve usability and implemented an option to exclude topics from full-text search in CHM files.

Last, not least, we have fixed several bugs in Visual Studio Help (.mshc), especially with multiple projects.

New features in version 6.3:

Webhelp: context numbers implemented

Webhelp: after publishing H&M now automatically opens the selected topic in the browser (like with CHM files). This will illustrate how to use Webhelp with context-sensitivity, without explaining it with lots of words.

Webhelp: sitemaps are split if they exceed the maximum size of 50.000 urls or 10 megabyte in size

HTML Help (.chm): topics that start with an underscore “_” can be excluded from search (new option in HTML > Misc)

Other bug fixes, changes and improvements:

Visual Studio Help (.mshc): problems with toggles fixed for VS 2012. The MSHC server modifies the HTML source at runtime and inserts hard-coded image path to every image, breaking our toggle images. The new toggle script now preserves any existing path and re-uses it.

Problem fix for Webhelp: collapse unfocused entries delivery false positives in some cases (javascript fix) and a script leak in the frame template was fixed to prevent cross-site scripting.

Find & Replace: bugfix when doing a bulk search with “whole word”, when clicking an entry of the result list, the first instance of the search term was highlighted regardless of the “whole word” option.

Topic editor and spell checker: the characters « and » are now recognized as quote characters.

PDF output: named destinations did not work in some cases. Named are now all exported as lowercase. Furthermore, the strikethrough format was not placed correctly and the trademark ™ symbol forced entire line to be exported as glyphs, which has been fixed. Also changed: you can now use variables with the owner and user password.